If you’re a regular user of the New York Times cooking app, or a serial scroller of food-focused social media feeds, you may have noticed that pistachios are having a moment.
As the BBC’s food blog asked earlier this year: Why are we going nuts for pistachios?
The flavorful green nuts are popping up everywhere from chocolates to cocktails — and it turns out, a significant number of them are grown in Arizona. The state’s arid climate is ideal for pistachio growing and early to mid-September is prime picking season.
Jim Graham is the owner and manager of Cochise Groves, a farm southeast of Tucson that grows pistachios. The Show caught up with him last week for an update on this year’s harvest.
Full conversation
JIM GRAHAM: Right now I’m sitting in my farm office observing my pistachio harvest that’s going on outside.
SAM DINGMAN: Oh, tell me what that looks like. What do you see right now?
GRAHAM: Well, I’m watching a custom harvester handle our harvest. It takes a shaker that shakes the trees and a catcher that catches the nuts as they fall off the tree before they hit the ground. And we have three sets of harvesters working in our orchard right now. We’re about halfway done with our harvest this year and always happy to be in the harvest and look forward to being done.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I can imagine. So how long is the growth cycle that leads up to this moment? When were the pistachios that are being harvested planted?
GRAHAM: These trees were planted around 1980, so they’re 45-year-old trees. They’re about 20 feet tall, and they’re spaced in rows 17 feet wide and 17 feet apart in the row. In our operation, we have roughly 21,000 trees to harvest.
DINGMAN: Twenty-one thousand trees. Wow.
GRAHAM: Yeah, pistachios are alternate bearing. They’ll have a big crop one year and a smaller crop the next year, and this is our smaller crop.
DINGMAN: So how many pounds of pistachios do you expect to come out of a small harvest, and how does that compare to a bigger harvest?
GRAHAM: Our alternate bearing swings are pretty wide. These older trees produce, typically a very heavy crop on their on year. We can have somewhere in the range of 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of nuts per acre. And in an off year, we’ll have roughly a quarter of that. And the reason for it is the fruit on a pistachio tree is produced on new growth that occurred last year.
So in a year where there’s a big crop, all the energy pretty much goes into raising the crop that’s on the tree, and there’s not much new growth that takes place. So there are fewer fruiting sites the following year, and thus there becomes this alternate bearing cycle with heavy years and lighter years.
DINGMAN: Got it. Let me ask you, I mean, probably a lot of us have had the experience of getting a bag of pistachios that are in the shells, splitting open the shells, taking out the little green nuts. How different is the product that is currently being plucked off of your trees from what ends up in that bag of pistachios that we get, say, at QuikTrip?
GRAHAM: When we harvest these nuts, they have a hull on the outside of the shell. It’s called an epicarp, and that epicarp needs to be removed within 24 hours after the harvest to keep the hull from staining the shell. We in the U.S. industry have worked really hard to make sure that we don’t have blemishes on the shell. People would remember that a lot of pistachios were dyed red, and the red dye was simply to cover up the brown stains that can occur on the shell.
DINGMAN: Wow. I don’t remember this period of pistachios being red. How long ago was that?
GRAHAM: Well, the pistachio industry in the United States is relatively young. The first commercial crop of pistachios was produced in the mid-1970s, which in terms of the length of the age of the trees and things like that, it’s not that old of a crop. The main producer of pistachios before the 1970s was Iran, and their harvesting and processing technology caused a lot of staining on the shells, and most of the stained shells would get dyed red.
DINGMAN: So was that purely an aesthetic thing?
GRAHAM: Yes, it just made them more aesthetically pleasing not to see brown spots on the blonde shells.
DINGMAN: So how did the U.S. come to stop dyeing them red and instead try to just remove the coloration altogether?
GRAHAM: Well, I think the public themselves recognize that this is not the way pistachios should look. And again, the technology has improved in the last 50 years with the timeliness of harvest, the processing period and being able to put a natural product in the hands of consumers.
DINGMAN: And Arizona is a pretty major pistachio producer, right?
GRAHAM: Yeah, we like to brag about it. Arizona is the 2nd leading producing state in the country. California produces 98%. We produce 1.5%, but we are number 2. We are number 2.
DINGMAN: It’s a short list, but we’re on it.
GRAHAM: It is, yes.
DINGMAN: And I understand you have a phrase about pistachios that you like to use to market them.
GRAHAM: Yeah, we tell people that you can’t eat just 50. Fifty is a normal serving when people sit down to eat the nuts, that’s about two ounces.
DINGMAN: Can I ask you, Jim, you know, we’ve heard a lot of stories from the agricultural world about the impact of tariffs recently.
GRAHAM: Well, we are certainly aware of them. And because the biggest part of the U.S. pistachio production gets exported to Europe and to Asia, yes, we’re very concerned about tariffs. We don’t like the idea of creating an unnecessary confrontation with countries that we want to be able to ship our pistachios to.
DINGMAN: And what about from a labor standpoint? I mean, that’s been another big storyline in agricultural communities is loss of labor due to the ongoing immigration crackdown. Have you dealt with any of that?
GRAHAM: We are also concerned about that and monitor it closely. We are a diversified farm. We also have a vineyard. We produce wine under our Golden Rule Vineyards label, and we rely very heavily on workers that come in and do a lot of handwork in the vineyard.
And we cherish these people that come and are willing to work and do this kind of work, and we like to see good, honest people being able to come and get jobs in the U.S. So I’m a proponent of legal immigration, and we rely quite heavily on people to come in and help us with our production.
DINGMAN: You mentioned that the name of your vineyard is Golden Rule. What is that name a reference to?
GRAHAM: We would like to treat other people the way we want to be treated. We produce things that we hope that people can enjoy, both the pistachios and the wine, and we’re relatively successful in being able to provide products to people that we would want to consume ourselves.
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